‘EA Sports College Football’ is back. Real college football players love it.

The full release of the game was Friday, though players received their deluxe copies earlier. On top of that copy, they were paid $600 each for the use of their name, image and likeness (NIL). Cover stars such as Texas’s Quinn Ewers, Colorado’s Travis Hunter and Michigan’s Donovan Edwards made much more.

“I didn’t have crazy high expectations for my rating,” Missouri quarterback Brady Cook said Tuesday at SEC Media Days in Dallas. “I wasn’t expecting to be a 95 or 96. We’ll save that for Luther. I just wanted to be 85 or above and I’d be happy, and I turned out an 88. So I’ll smile.”

Luther is wide receiver Luther Burden III, Cook’s top target and a preseason Heisman candidate. With his 94 rating, he is also tied for the third-best player in the game. On Sunday, Burden and Cook faced off at Burden’s apartment, both choosing to play with Missouri. Cook, glued to the screen, put up 600 passing yards and more than 150 on the ground in a win.

With himself, of course. Finally.

But are coaches worried about their guys playing too much ahead of the upcoming season?

“Well, I know three of them that aren’t going to get to it until later, which is a good thing, because they’re here with me,” Clark Lea, Vanderbilt’s coach, cracked in Dallas. “If it were me, I’d be playing that game. They’re going to play it. Listen, we message this all the time: There’s always sacrifice in what we do, which includes that there is a time when we have to turn it off and go to bed.”

Billy Napier, Florida’s coach, already dealt with a tired player at Media Days this week. It being the offseason still, running back Montrell Johnson Jr. copped to playing the game until 2 a.m. But it’s not as if the program has shied away from it, either.

“We had early access to the game and we had our team in our Gator Room, we broke our accountability teams into a bracket,” Napier said. “They had to select two players to play for each team. We had four stations set up. We had pizza. We had wings. And, man, I’m going to tell you, you talk about competing. You talk about energy in the room. I mean, it was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Here is football tradition clashing with the modern business of college sports. At Vanderbilt, sacrifice now includes shutting down the video game you were paid to appear in. At Florida, your accountability group doubled as your College Football 25 teammates.

Before July 1, 2021, when the NCAA changed its rules to allow college athletes to earn NIL money, those sentences would have been unthinkable. Sure, the hypocrisy was clear, especially because O’Bannon v. NCAA — the landmark case that led to athletes’ NIL rights — stemmed from Ed O’Bannon seeing himself in a video game and wondering why he hadn’t received a dime.

Then, the avatar looked like O’Bannon, a former UCLA basketball player, and wore his No. 31. But in an effort to avoid the legal liability to pay athletes, the NCAA and EA Sports just didn’t use their names. You know, amateurism and all.

So that this game exists, and that the athletes are profiting, is a loud, blinking sign of the times. Not every player, however, will have Cook’s experience, commanding the game with his own tiny character. Not every player, for that matter, will have the chance to control himself at all.

Take Trey Zuhn III, an offensive lineman for Texas A&M: “You can’t really play as a left tackle.”

Or Gunnar Hansen, an offensive lineman for Vanderbilt: “I guess I’ll just cuss myself out if I’m not playing well.”

Or Debo Williams, a South Carolina linebacker: “Just shutting everything down. Getting interceptions, getting sacks, wreaking havoc, getting turnovers.”

“I did see there weren’t any South Carolina players with a 90 rating or above,” said Williams, who didn’t seek out his own rating ahead of time. “They’re trying to come for our season already, man.”